Senior Manager, Engineering – Community Support Engineering

Job Description

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. The Community You Will Join: We are looking for a passionate and forward-thinking Sr Engineering Manager to lead our Ambassador Routing and Communications (ARC) team.

ARC team sits at the heart of Airbnb’s Community Support Platform, ensuring that guest and host issues are routed with precision and care to our ambassadors across voice, messaging, email, and other channels. Your leadership will directly enable magical customer experiences and empower our ambassadors worldwide. This is an opportunity to impact some of the most innovative customer service engineering initiatives at Airbnb. You’ll lead a high-impact engineering team tackling technical and operational complexity—driving our evolution towards intelligent, resilient, skill-based, and differentiated support for our global community.

The Difference You Will Make:Establish and champion a high-performing engineering culture focused on technical excellence, strong ownership, and inclusion. Partner closely with product leaders, operations, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate and influence business priorities into technical strategy and deliverables.

Drive the adoption of agile, iterative development processes that consistently deliver high-quality, predictable outcomes. Coach and mentor engineers and other leaders, elevating talent and fostering an environment of continuous learning. Shape and execute on the ARC strategy, modernizing the platform to meet the aspirations of differentiated and resilient global support.

Help ensure business priorities and technical investments are balanced to delivery long term health of systems. Manage, grow, and inspire a distributed team of engineers working on large-scale systems at the core of Airbnb’s customer support experience. Exciting Projects You Will Lead: Project Vicarius: A groundbreaking initiative that provides disaster recovery and regional failover capabilities for customer support.

Vicarius ensures that even during major regional or infrastructure outages, ambassadors can continue to serve guests and hosts by intelligently routing critical interactions, especially safety cases, to available teams in alternate regions with minimal disruption. Differentiated Service: Build and scale the AI powered systems that deliver differentiated, personalized support to our most valued customers.

This enables targeted experiences—such as expedited assistance for premium guests or specialized handling for critical issues—by deeply integrating customer attributes and ambassador skills into routing decisions. Routing 0: Lead the transformation from complex, queue-based routing to a modern, skills-based and data-driven intelligent routing engine.

Routing 0 dramatically reduces operational complexity and unlocks more adaptive, intelligent, and efficient assignment of cases to the best-suited ambassadors based on skills, proficiency, and business goals. This project has the potential to transform how business manages routing with strategic investment in a system that can auto balance capacity (available agents) and demand (incoming contacts) to make dynamic decisions that enhance community experience.

Skill-Based Routing: Implement a sophisticated skills and proficiency framework that matches every customer inquiry with the best-equipped ambassador. This strategic shift from static queues to dynamic agent attributes enables faster resolution, higher customer satisfaction, and more effective utilization of our ambassador workforce. Your Expertise:Proven engineering leadership experience (ideally 5+ years managing engineers, with at least 2+ years at a manager-of-managers level).

Deep expertise in large-scale backend systems, distributed services, or enterprise applications—preferably in the customer support or communications domain. Hands-on experience establishing agile, iterative engineering processes and driving continuous improvements in quality and predictability. A strong track record of influencing cross-functional outcomes and building trusted partnerships with Product, Operations, and Data teams.

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